


Luz

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Anatomy, Crime Scenes, Love, Reunions, and bones, bodies, revival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-03
Updated: 2013-10-03
Packaged: 2017-12-27 18:17:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/982092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Here,” John said, light shattered on the breaks of Baker. </p>
<p>The top of the neck.  The base of the spine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Luz

**Author's Note:**

> For [ChapBook](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ChapBook), with many thanks for the inspiration.
> 
> Thank you to [PFG](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart) for the Talmud.

 

In a new-dug plot, allotments at Walthamstow, they found a cache of bones.

That might have been fifty years old.

“Forty-five,” Sherlock says, flicks ash, gloves up for the barest touch.

Here a spine, once-living. Serial, almost certainly.

Lestrade’s brows rise and John’s hand descends on his radius.

Steady on.

As the London sun dips.

On what won’t decay.

*

When he came home, when they met again, he was reminded.

“Here,” John said, light shattered on the breaks of Baker. “Here, here.” The top of the neck. The slick of the back. The base of the spine.

Bullet. Second scar. Vertebral space.

Electrics ending in bone, flaring in fire, a memory not even his.

“Here,” John said. “Look here.”

At what fires us, what always fires us; what does.  
  
*

In Portugal, the Algarve, where shadows were blue from the mountains.

And in the villaged valleys.

Was blood. Were figs and almonds, fish and the sea.

The dawn cracked and he thought of John's hands in the morning, in the soaped sink, the neck-back dishrag slung, the day begun. He broke over it, the mundane he thought he'd never. The bore of knob and joint and bone.

The marrow’s grown again, unharmable.

In water fire hammer blade.

Think on the time he came home and they -

felt nearly destroyed, but could never be.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [ Luz, Portugal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praia_da_Luz)
> 
>  
> 
> [Luz, the imperishable bone](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luz_%28bone%29), the bone from which the body might be resurrected, which does not decay; the seventh cervical vertebra or at the base of the spine, depending on who’s naming, and telling.
> 
>  [“The Mystical Bone of Resurrection.”](http://radiology.rsna.org/content/163/3/718.full.pdf)
> 
> “Luz, the city known for its blue dye, is the city which Sennacherib entered but could not harm; Nebuchadnezzar, but could not destroy; the city over which the angel of death has no power; outside the walls of which the aged who are tired of life are placed, where they meet death" (Soṭah 46b).


End file.
